What is the "Help Center Unified Search Results Page" EAP?

The current Help Center search results user interface presents search results in two columns when both Knowledge base and Community are enabled. Users can then use pagination controls to view more results.

Rather than having users try to navigate two results sets at once, we'd like to present the most relevant content from your entire Help Center to your users. We also want to improve the ability for users to navigate a result set by being able to filter based on result type, topic and section. Our goal is to improve the ability of users to quickly and easily find the most relevant content from a Help Center while giving them context into where they're searching.

That's great, how does it work?

Here is a screen cast of the updated search results page as seen in the Copenhagen theme. You can see the initial search, navigation into Community topics, Knowledge base categories and finally viewing an article.

Here's another close up shot of the new sidebar

This looks great, how do I get it?

Go ahead and sign up for the beta. If you are currently on a standard version of the Copenhagen theme, we can just enable it for your account. If you are on a custom theme, we will be delivering instructions on how to update your theme templates. We ask that you have technical resources available to implement these changes.

Is there any possibility of defining custom filters that group 'categories" — we have a dozen categories that are Product Documentation, and would love people to be able to search across all product documentation, without getting to the categories we use for announcements, release notes, webinar information, etc.

@Jonathan - I think it's a huge improvement for those customers who are using both Knowledge base and Community but we expect it to improve the experience for customer with only a Knowledge base as well.

@Larry - Today we don't have that ability to group categories or provide a complex content hierarchy like you're describing. However, the side bar will display all of your categories for your users to filter on. Let me know if that answers your questions. As Jennifer said, we are using it today on this Help Center so that should help give you an idea of how it works.

Hey All! The first 10 customers that signed up have been contacted and added to the beta. I'm excited to hear their feedback and see the progress. Based on how this initial roll out goes, I'll be contacting more of you over the next 2 weeks. If you have questions, please go ahead and post them to the forum.

Great question. When we look at no clicks in this case, we look at actual click through to articles. With the new navigational structure, this can happen from a number of places and we don't record a difference between clicking on an article for the unified page or through subsequent filtering, etc.

So, if I understand correctly, if they click to filter the search results, it's still on the search page, so clicking on the article after filtering, a click to article is recorded. But, if they navigate away from the search results after filtering, without clicking on an article, then no-click is recorded. Yes?

Apologies as I should communicate have communicated this more broadly. We are currently pausing this beta for the time being. Our goal is to continue to move forward with this UI change but we are revisiting some of the underlying search infrastructure for Guide before moving forward with it.

I wasn't able to locate the post you mentioned previously. I would recommend cross posting your feedback in our Guide Product Feedback topic as that is the official topic our Product Managers view for feedback. This will also help provide visibility to other users in need of a similar functionality.